


The Silvering of the Exceptional Escapist

by Satchelfoot



Category: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
Genre: Aging, Historical References, Post-Canon, Silver Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:23:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2810417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Satchelfoot/pseuds/Satchelfoot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1964, Joe reads a comic book that convinces him to resurrect one of his old golems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Silvering of the Exceptional Escapist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dickwhitmans](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dickwhitmans/gifts).



In his late thirties, Joe Kavalier had begun, slowly but definitely, to gray. By the time he made his fateful visit to his favorite newsstand in March 1964, a long, slender silver streak flowed along his left temple. To augment the distinguished, professorial aspect of his changing pigmentation, he had begun to wear tweed suits to work regularly, though every suit quickly became as ink-stained and rumpled as everything else he had ever worn while drawing; he had once even attempted to grow a beard, hoping that his facial hair had gone salt-and-pepper; but after a couple of his weeks his face in the mirror began to remind him of his time on the ice, and he quickly shaved the hairs off and made no effort to grow them again. Rosa was just as glad: she thought the fully grown beard might have proven quite fetching, but in the meantime his stubbly face was almost impossible to kiss.

That day in March marked the end of a year in which he had felt himself begun to drift creatively. As the owner and artistic director of Empire Comics, Joe spent so much time working with a stable of other artists, including the one to whom he was married, that he had a comparatively small amount of time for his own art—meaning that he often spent only seven hours a day drawing, as compared to the ten- or twelve-hour days he had pulled in the early months after he had bought Empire. 

The company had benefited greatly from what would be coined some years later as the Silver Age of Comics, but Joe had not yet been able to shake the feeling that he and his friends (no matter how long he presided over them, he couldn’t get accustomed to thinking of anyone on his staff as employees) were riding the coattails of DC and Marvel, following the trends of the day rather than creating them. The men who worked for Joe, among them Julie Glovsky, Marty Gold, and Davy O’Dowd, were tremendously talented and turned in polished work every day with very little supervision, but they were not innovators. The fifteen titles put out by the company, at least half of which were still scripted remotely by Sam Clay, seemed a little hidebound much of the time, one foot still stuck, perhaps, in the patterns their creators had established between 1939 and 1941. 

Empire’s secret weapon, its only artist whose stuff could currently be described as pioneering, was George Rose, who had begun writing and drawing the relaunched Luna Moth in 1962, immediately after Rose Saxon had passed the reins of her romance titles to a successor she had finally deemed worthy after months of apprenticeship. The name George Rose was invented by Rosa Saks as a cheeky nod to two pseudonymous Georges of an earlier time, Eliot and Sand; like them, she felt that she could not be taken seriously in her field as a woman. The pseudonym was an open secret; no one at Empire would actively lie about it to anyone curious enough to ask point-blank about the new writer, but most of their readers didn’t care enough to pry, and Rosa always answered fan mail as George.

As his eyes glanced over the rows of comics, Joe thought he saw a familiar costume on the cover of The Avengers no. 4. He took another look and found that he had not imagined it: a face he hadn’t seen since the war was looking out at him from the foreground of the cover. But what place could that guy possibly have in the Marvel Universe, someone who had been introduced in 1940 in a cover that showed him landing a punch that would have made the Escapist envious right on the jaw of Adolf Hitler? Joe had to know. So he put a copy of the issue on the top of his stack, paid, took a dozen comic books back to his office, and read the new Avengers first. And read it again. And then half-read it a third time while drawing some new sketches, looking up occasionally at the comic and flipping between pages.

During the next weekly phone conversation between Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, amid discussion of Tommy’s academic progress in the math department at Oxford and Sammy’s work on a lightly satirical Saturday morning cartoon modeled on Rocky and Bullwinkle, the following exchange took place:

“Hey, Sammy, did you see Avengers no. 4?”

“Not yet. Are they picking on the Hulk again?”

“No, but you’ll never guess who joined the team.”

“Spider-Man?”

“No.”

“The made nice with the Sub-Mariner?”

“Hell no. He’s still trying to kill everyone. But the guy who gets them out of trouble this time is Captain America.”

“Joe, I think the line cut out for a second. Who did you say?”

“There is nothing wrong with the line, Sammy. I said Captain America.”

“A new guy taking the name?”

“No, it is Steve Rogers.”

“Wouldn’t he pushing fifty?”

“He looks about the same. There is an explanation¬—kind of a new origin story to bring him up to date.”

“Huh. And he fits in with the team?”

“Not really. But which hero in Marvel Comics is accustomed to fitting in?”

“There is that.”

“Sammy?”

“What?”

“We have to bring him back.”

“Bring who back?”

“Think about it.”

\--------------

In 1954, the Iron Chain finally succeeded, as it thought, in ridding the world of its greatest enemies. Luring the Escapist into his undersea lair with rumors of a terrible new super-weapon, the Chain’s cleverest flunky, the Saboteur, had tricked him into entering a small, indestructible vessel that was promptly sealed against all possibility of egress and fired toward the center of the earth. But Tom Mayflower managed to make it a bitter victory: breaking into the vessel’s engine compartment with a dim hope of delaying the launching sequence, he finally settled for cranking the engine’s power to maximum, destroying the Saboteur’s sanctum in the exhaust from the ignition that launched our hero into the world’s depths. Radiation from the overworked engine rendered the Escapist unconscious and held him in a state of suspended animation as he hurtled ever farther toward the planet’s molten core. The Saboteur was presumed dead, though no trace of his body has ever been found.

In the Escapist’s absence, the Iron Chain conducted a devastating campaign to destroy the League of the Golden Key. The Escapist’s lair beneath the Empire Palace Theater was dynamited; Omar and Miss Plum Blossom were brutally killed. Big Al, the Ogre, is still presumed dead, though the assassins tasked with his murder were executed for failing to produce a body. Throughout the world, members of the League were hunted down, until only a small few, driven into hiding, knew of the fellowship that had struggled so long to end tyranny around the globe. Thus did the Iron Chain begin to wrap itself inexorably around humanity’s destiny, with terribly few champions left to fight for freedom.

One of those champions, Judy Dark, one day finds herself walking along the river on one of the very few days she takes away from both her job at the Empire City Public Library and her more dangerous nocturnal work as Luna Moth. Suddenly, she sees a large craft bob up in the water only a hundred yards away. Assuming at first that it must be some kind of space vessel—extraterrestrial events or more or les de rigeur in Empire City in 1964—she nonetheless seems to sense something exceptional about this ship. She is drawn to it like, well, a moth to a flame. She remains there at the riverside, staring out at the vessel, until sunset; then, under cover of dark, she invokes the goddess Lo and assumes her aspect as Mistress of the Night. It is Luna Moth who floats out across the water to inspect this mysterious capsule. 

The Saboteur’s final invention appears smooth and unlined from the outside, none the worse for wear after its decade of travel through the world’s depths. A sojourn among the Earth’s tectonic plates and the provenance of a series of earthquakes have repeatedly changed its trajectory and finally brought the Escapist back to a city that sorely needs his help. But can he possibly have survived his long, unbroken sleep?

Even with powers limited only by her imagination, Luna Moth is unable to physically pry open the craft. But she knows somehow that the occupant within is important, perhaps even vital to the freedom of humanity. So she sings. An eerie, ancient song wells up from the depths of her being and reverberates through the impenetrable metal. The melody somehow reaches into the very atoms of the vessel, and a hatch forms on its side. With no hesitation, Luna Moth opens it and steps into the belly of the Escapist’s prison. 

In a space so cramped that her wings and antennae brush the ceiling, she finds an impossible man fast asleep on the floor of the craft. After her initial shock of recognition, and after determining that he really is still alive, she reflects that the poor fellow will have a terrific backache after sleeping on the hard metal floor for a decade. Rather than trying to nudge him awake, she continues to sing the same uncanny melody until his eyelids flicker. Finally, Tom opens his eyes on an old friend and a new world. There will be time later for him to learn of the fate of his friends and break the terrible grip of the Iron Chain once again. But for now it is enough to know that the Escapist has come home.

\--------------

“The lawyers aren’t gonna like it at all, Joe. The Escapist is supposed to be dead.”

“Bah. That deal was made with Anapol, not me. I will insist. This needs to happen, Sammy.”

“All right. But on one condition. No mask.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“But the mask is…”

“Unnecessary. The Iron Chain already knows who the Escapist is. Hell, they might even have leaked his identity to the press after he was gone, made it a matter of public record.”

“But all superheroes wear masks.”

“Not all of them. Not the Fantastic Four. Everyone’s known their identities almost since the beginning. I… I like superheroes who don’t have anything to hide, Joe.”

Joe thought for a moment. “Very well. The mask goes. Any other costume changes? I’m going to start drawing Exceptional Escapist no. 1 tonight.”

“I dunno. Maybe add a little silver around the edges?”

“Is that a comment about my hair?”

“Yes and no.”

And so the Escapist was reborn, unmasked, to an uncertain legal future and a frightened, complicated world that needed him once again.


End file.
